Mother survives terminal cancer, looks to future

Ann Silberman's story takes unexpected turn

Ann Silberman laughs and looks at her son, Matt Kempster, who is now 17. The biology specialist on Mira Loma High School’s Science Bowl team, Kempster and his four teammates won yet another national championship just weeks ago. A senior, Kempster is now on the brink of graduation.

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Ann Silberman laughs and looks at her son, Matt Kempster, who is now 17. The biology specialist on Mira Loma High School’s Science Bowl team, Kempster and his four teammates won yet another national championship just weeks ago. A senior, Kempster is now on the brink of graduation.

I interviewed her for a feature on the parallel accomplishments that she and her son had realized—accomplishments that for Matt included academic honors of the highest degree (first lady Michelle Obama has watched Matt compete, and win, national science competitions—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg) and for Ann included watching Matt graduate from high school. Her presence at the June 4th ceremony meant that against all odds she had lived, with a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, for more than three years.

“It’s a very confusing experience, to deeply accept and believe your fate, and then have it suddenly changed.”

On June 30, after a preemptive “Long post – sorry” preface, Silberman posted a short essay that included these words on her website’s Facebook account.

During our interview, she had told me that while she had been relatively healthy for several months, the intense pain in her liver—the vital organ to which her breast cancer had metastasized over three years ago—indicated to her that the happy respite was drawing to a close. This would likely mean that she had just a few months to live.

A scheduled PET scan would shed light on the situation within a few weeks.

Silberman’s story just took its least expected turn yet.

Not only was she wrong about her cancer growing, the scan showed that her cancer had disappeared entirely.

“I just said, ‘Really? You’re kidding me. That’s not what I expected to hear. That’s going to require a change in thinking.’”

For a woman with Stage IV breast cancer, the prognosis changing from "terminal" to "NED (no evidence of disease)" is unthinkably rare.

“My doctor says there’s a chance I may never see cancer again,” Silberman says.

Nurses hugged her, cried. One nurse told her that in four years of oncology, she had never seen a patient in Ann’s condition go into remission. Another happily said that it looked like the only place they’d be seeing one another was at the grocery store.

Silberman texted her husband, and told her two sons, Matt and Chris, that night.

“They were pretty surprised,” she says. “Of course, it was a great night when I told them. They hugged me. We went out to dinner to celebrate.”

Her youngest son, Matt, will start college at Pasadena’s prestigious Caltech this fall. Before hearing her NED status, Silberman did not know if she would even be able to see that journey begin.

Now, like any normal mom, she has told Matt of her plans to hover above the Caltech campus at all times in a helicopter, so she can see firsthand how classes are going.

“Oh yeah, he loved that idea,” she laughs.

But not everything about being suddenly told you’re not going to die, surprisingly, is easy.

“It’s a mental adjustment, because I was completely prepared to have a short life,” Silberman says.

“You start to think in a certain way. You stop planning, thinking about the future, and you live in the moment, and that is a blessing that happens to you. And suddenly there’s this future. And you start thinking: can I really plan something a year from now?”

Silberman now sits at a crossroads between a place of exuberance bathed in disbelief, uncertainty about the future, and a past that should have been lethal.

“I’ve been walking on one type of surface,” she says, “and suddenly my right foot is on another type of surface. It’s good and happy but there’s no security.”

The lack of a guaranteed future—even if that future is death—requires a change in mentality.

“Even knowing that I was sick and going to die, there was security in that,” says Silberman. “I knew kind of what was going to happen.”

Now, that security—however horrific—has dissipated. But even if a lack of certainty has, in some ways, replaced security, it is now shrouded in hope, tempered with Ann’s committed pragmatism.

“I’m in remission; I’m not cured,” she clarifies. “I don’t know if this period will last three years, five years, ten years, or thirty years. It’s so hard to describe.”

But that’s exactly what she’s done, in hundreds of blog and Facebook posts. Silberman runs a blog that hosts several million site visitors, its popularity due in part to the fact that it provides support for women battling breast cancer. Sharing her experience has had a therapeutic effect for both her audience, and herself.

“When I would go through something uncomfortable or scary, I would think about how I was going to tell the story for my blog,” she says. “It took my mind off it, and the experience was different because of that.”

Sharing her story with others changed her perspective on her own experience.

“Because I never felt like anything I had to do was so horrifying, I felt like other people could do it too.”

Due to the outreach of her online presence, Silberman has forged friendships and connections that span the international community.

“People were rooting for me from all over the country and all over the world.”

While she is not religious, Silberman does believe that she has been affected by the actions of people who are.

“I’m on prayer lists all over the country. All these strangers that have never met me and never will are thinking good thoughts for me. And it’s really powerful.

“The power of people, it’s really impressive. It’s not spiritual or religious stuff, for me, it’s just other people.”

With those connections comes a degree of tragedy; many of Silberman’s friends, whom she has met through communities like her own online, have not been as lucky as she has in fighting their cancer.

Silberman realizes that she did nothing wrong in outlasting her disease, and that her deceased friends would be celebrating right beside her if they were still alive. But survivor's guilt is another piece of the mental struggle that Silberman now faces.

“You wish everybody could have what you have.”

From her story, Silberman wants to impart a particular kind of message. Like everything that she writes, like the example she constantly sets for other women who struggle with cancer, it is rooted in honesty and practicality—but there is also an element of the enigma of the possible. Some people might call that the miraculous. Whatever you want to call it, it is something that Ann Silberman cannot help but embody.

“I want people to take from my story hope,” she says. “But I don’t want them to think there is a cure until there is. I don’t want people to have false hope.”

Paraphrasing words of an oncologist she has read in the past few years, Silberman explains that having cancer can be like climbing Mt. Everest. One step, one breath at a time, you climb. You can become exhausted, depleted; the terrain and the voyage can alter your mind, your sanity, take away what you’d thought was normalcy. But sometimes, you look up, and you find that you’re no longer climbing.

“You just hope that there will be a meadow,” she says, “that you can get up and rest in. Maybe this is just another meadow.”

Without a pause or a hint of doubt, the voice of a fearless pragmatist continues.

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